1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of instant messaging and more particularly to chat session transcription for chat sessions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Instant messaging as a technology provides the backbone of real time communications amongst collaborators. Though the notion of real time communications harkens back before the days of the World Wide Web to a citizens band radio analog for computer communications, instant messaging as a technology only has begun to come into its own in the past several years. Originally, instant messaging was limited only to the basic exchange of text messages within a dashboard display of messages. As the technology has matured, though, additional functionality has been added including the integration of voice and video into chat sessions and also the use of emotional icons (emoticons) to visually express the emotions experienced by a chat session participant.
Emoticons are well known in the world of electronic communications and have found use not only in instant messaging, but also in asynchronous modes of communication like e-mail. So popular have emoticons become, that people have been known to hand write emoticons outside of the computer communications modality in order to express emotion pictorially in writing without resort to a textual description of emotion. From the human factors perspective, however, emoticons are a rudimentary mechanism to communicate one's feeling during a remote conversation despite the inability of participants to the conversation to “hear” and “see” one another.
Integral to the instant messaging experience is the notion of a chat transcript. While instant messaging aims to provide an adequate substitute for human-to-human conversation, instant messaging in many ways is a superior mode of communication in that unlike interpersonal conversations, in the instant messaging world, a chat session can be secured and a chat session can be recorded for future reference. In the latter circumstance, end users can choose to persist a transcript of a contemporaneous conversation on a case by case basis, or end users can choose simply to record all chat sessions into a transcript for future reference.
When recording a chat transcript, the emotional state of participants to the chat session can be recorded only to the extent that emoticons are provided by the different participants. However, emoticons as provided by participants are only subjective views of the actual emotional dependent exclusively on the judgment of the participant providing the emoticon. Further, to the extent that audio has been included as part of the chat session, the nature of the audio conversation will be lost along with the emotional state of the participants to the audio conversation apparent from the voice of the participants.